Conventionally, in general, the owner of a recording medium such as an optical disc having contents of music, etc. recorded thereon does not write information about the ownership of the recording medium to the recording area thereof. Thus, it is difficult for the user to specify his optical disc among similar recording media of the same appearance. So, there is proposed a recording medium to which the user can write his identification information so as to distinguish his optical disc from other similar recording media.
On the other hand, such identification information written to a recording medium by the user is utilized only to confirm the ownership and non-ownership of the recording medium, and there has not been proposed a method utilizing the identification information with a communication network such as the internet linked to a manufacturer.